TMCnet News
Symantec to Acquire WholeSecurityBy DAVID R. BUTCHER, Assistant Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions
Symantec Corp., which provides security solutions for enterprises and individuals, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire WholeSecurity, Inc., a provider of behavior-based security and anti-phishing technology.
The transaction is expected to close in October. “Combining our behavior-based technology with Symantec's industry-leading solutions will allow us to deliver this capability to a much broader audience and move us further toward our vision of providing zero-hour protection for every endpoint,” said WholeSecurity President and CEO J. Peter Selda in a company statement.
California-based Symantec provides a range of solutions to help enterprises and individuals protective their assets. The company’s solutions include those for enterprise and consumer security, data management, application and infrastructure management, security management, storage and service management, and response and managed security services.
WholeSecurity’s technology analyzes the characteristics and actions of viruses, worms and other malicious code to offer real-time protection against these threats without the need for traditional security signatures. In addition to protection from phishing attacks, the company’s family of solutions provides critical behavior-based security technology that identifies online threats such as worms, viruses, Trojan horses and keystroke loggers.
WholeSecurity’s Confidence Online analyzes the behavior exhibited by these threats against hundreds of detection modules to determine whether the active processes or Web sites are safe or malicious. This technology immediately detects and mitigates unknown threats by their behavior without traditional signatures or patches, thereby protecting users against zero-day attacks.
WholeSecurity’s Confidence Online for Web Applications is designed to protect unmanaged or remote computers that access company resources while without a behavior-based agent already installed. Following an initial scan at login, Confidence Online integrates with Web applications to allow clean computers to access the Web application, protecting or blocking infected machines prior to connection. Confidence Online then continuously scans the user’s system to ensure “threats are neutralized before they can do damage,” according to the company’s latest announcement.
Confidence Online for Corporate PCs protects employees by providing “always-on” protection for corporate IT-managed computers.
Designed to protect consumer e-commerce sessions, WholeSecurity’s Confidence Online for E-Commerce seamlessly and automatically delivers on-demand security, halting eavesdropping threats from running on a consumer’s computer.
Last, Confidence Online Phish Finder provides real-time, browser-based protection from fraudulent Web sites. The Phish Report Network (PRN), powered by Confidence Online, is an anti-phishing aggregation service that enables companies to report and block phishing Web sites and better protect online consumers worldwide.
For further information about these two companies, visit WholeSecurity and Symantec Corp. online.
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David R. Butcher is Assistant Editor of Customer Interaction Solutions. To see more articles by David Butcher, visit his archive.
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